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Automate the maintenance of your Visual Basic projects

Have
you ever worked on a VB application developed by someone else?
Or on an application written 6 months ago? If you have, you
know how difficult it is then to make modifications in the
code.

How
does this application work? How do you test the application’s
behaviour after you have made a modification, such as modifying
the structure of a table? This is all about Impact Analysis
… You know; Those tedious analyses we rarely make. Only
they are the only way to reduce the risk of mistakes while
maintaining applications and therefore the only way to reduce
the costs related to maintenance.
Thanks to Visual Expert you will be able to achieve complete
impact analyses on any VB objects in a few clicks (graphical
objects, functions, variable…)

Visual Expert also allows you to explore swiftly the application’s
code (far more quickly than with the VB explorer), it enables
you to display the structure of this code and most of all
it allows you to generate complete technical documentation
for your projects (HTML or RTF format).

Finally Visual Expert can also audit your
code to control the different elements’ naming rules
and to detect the dead code of the application. This isn’t
a tool especially dedicated to quality auditing but it has
features which can be useful.

Analysing
your project

Before you can explore it, Visual Expert
will analyse your code. A wizard will help you declare your
project and define the list of VB elements you wish to be
analysed. You may take the elements one by one or import your
complete VB project’s file. I strongly recommend you
to use the latter. Visual Expert will then launch your project’s
code analysis. You can then almost instantly explore your
code in the Graphical Interface.

Exploring
the code

Visual Expert’s graphical interface
has three different parts; a tree view, displaying the structure
of the application, a “source code” view and a
“detail” view displaying information about the
element selected.

Visual
Expert’s graphical interface has three different parts

The tree view

The tree view allows you to navigate in the structure of
the application: for each item (a method, a form, a property
for example) you can select one or more links (for example:
for a method: the method called or the calling method; for
a form, the list of controls).

This way of exploring the code is efficient and fast but
needs a bit of time to get used to (there are several different
lists of links offered). Once you have been trained you
will never be able to look for “who uses what?”
or to locate a method again without Visual Expert...

Thanks to the tree view Impact analyses are neatly displayed;
you will find all the scripts referring to such property
or such method in a few clicks …

The source code
view

The source code’s display allows you to navigate in
the code of the application directly as you would in an
HTML page. The code is coloured and the referenced methods
are hyperlinks.

Visual Expert’s graphical
interface has three different parts

If you click on these hyperlinks you will immediately see
the method’s code. “Next” and “Previous”
buttons enable you to come back to code you have already displayed.
This view is very useful to navigate directly in the source
code of your application.

The
« detail » view

This view displays information on the element selected
in the tree view. This information includes the complete
name of the source file, the date of the first modification,
the type of components, etc. But you can also find information
on the dead code of the application (unused variables, for
examples) or again on the quality of the code (see if the
naming rules are respected, the use of global variables
…).

The association of these three views is particularly efficient
to navigate in the application.

It is easy to go from an impact analysis to searching for
a bug in the code.

Recently I was reading an article saying we spend 50% of
the time looking for the code to modify, 30% modifying it
and 20% of the time testing it. Visual Expert allows you
to reduce the time spent in the search phase. Also it will
give you a better result than whatever you would have found
on your own. How much time have I spent in the VB search
window!

Generating
technical documentation

Visual Expert allows you to generate technical documentation
on your application. It is possible to generate technical
documentation in RTF format (useful for printing) or HTML
(useful to transfer the documentation via Internet). The
documentation you obtain is pretty complete.

Not only does
it contain classic information about the elements of your
application (such as the list of controls and methods) but
it also gives you information on referenced or referencing
components. Visual Expert will also display the forms of the
applications and their preview. It is a pity that the screen
shot should be in the BMP format because the pictures are
heavy and non compatible with Netscape.

Visual Expert can analyse these comments including your own
information in the documentation (this may remind you of Javadoc,
for those of you who know Java)

Conclusion

Visual Expert is a tool which judiciously
completes VB’s features. VB is indeed perfectly conceived
to develop an application but gives little help on the maintenance
aspect.

You will save precious time using Visual Expert. Moreover
if you are in need of source code documentation for your projects
Visual Expert will generate in a few minutes what it usually
takes us days to finish.

Thanks to Visual Expert you can focus on your new project,
VB.NET or else.

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Novalys is an international Software Vendor, founded in 1998, privately held, with subsidiaries and distributors in North America, Europe, South America, Middle East and Asia. We provide development team with powerful solutions to develop and maintain successful applications. Learn More